Today’s sparkling feature is from a book on this week’s reading list: My Salinger Year, by Joanna Rakoff.

Intros: (All of Us Girls)

There were hundreds of us, thousands of us, carefully dressing in the gray morning light of Brooklyn, Queens, the Lower East Side, leaving our apartments weighed down by tote bags heavy with manuscripts, which we read as we stood in line at the Polish bakery, the Greek deli, the corner diner, waiting to order our coffee, light and sweet, and our Danish, to take on the train, where we would hope for a seat so that we might read more before we arrived at our offices in midtown, Soho, Union Square. We were girls, of course, all of us girls, emerging from the 6 train at Fifty-First Street and walking past the Waldorf-Astoria, the Seagram Building on Park, all of us clad in variations on a theme—the neat skirt and sweater, redolent of Sylvia Plath at Smith—each element purchased by parents in some comfortable suburb, for our salaries were so low we could barely afford our rent, much less lunch in the vicinities of our offices or dinners out, even in the cheap neighborhoods we’d populated, sharing floor-throughs with other girls like us, assistants at other agencies or houses or the occasional literary nonprofit. All day we sat, our legs crossed at the knee, on our swivel chairs, answering the call of our bosses, ushering in writers with the correct mixture of enthusiasm and remove, never belying the fact that we got into this business not because we wanted to fetch glasses of water for visiting writers but because we wanted to be writers ourselves, and this seemed the most socially acceptable way to go about doing so, though it was already becoming clear that this was not at all the way to go about doing so….

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Teaser: As the train raced me up to midtown to the Agency, I suddenly thought of Mark David Chapman. Had he written a fan letter—fan letters?—to Salinger? Had the 1980 or 1979 version of me methodically opened a plain white envelope and found a crazed rant? (p. 74).

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Poignant, keenly observed, and irresistibly funny: a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century.

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches. At night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Williamsburg apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities, and struggling to trust her own artistic instinct, Rakoff is tasked with answering Salinger’s voluminous fan mail. But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agency’s decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger’s devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back. Over the course of the year, she finds her own voice by acting as Salinger’s, on her own dangerous and liberating terms.

Rakoff paints a vibrant portrait of a bright, hungry young woman navigating a heady and longed-for world, trying to square romantic aspirations with burgeoning self-awareness, the idea of a life with life itself. Charming and deeply moving, filled with electrifying glimpses of an American literary icon, My Salinger Year is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer. Above all, it is a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives and awaken our true selves.

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That intro is a very long series of meandering sentences, so I didn’t quite manage a whole paragraph. Aside from that issue, what do you think? Would you keep reading?

Definitely, despite the lengthy sentences…LOL. Or maybe because of them. I don’t read a lot of memoirs, but I’m drawn to those that highlight authors’ lives and/or the publishing world. Thanks for visiting, Wendy.

For me, too, Dagny…secretarial duties bought my way through my first two years of college! And then again, before I found a job on my career path afterwards. Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy your book.

I’ve had this book recommended to me several times, but never took the time to read the intro or excerpts. Now I can see why my friends thought I might like it – love the intro, the images it brings to mind, and I’m familiar with the locations mentioned. I’d definitely keep reading this one!